SINCE September 11, 2001, world politics has resembled a cheap novel which has little regard for plausibility. That is why Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour Party. According to the Sunday Times yesterday, he has told allies that he will step aside and allow someone else to become prime minister if Boris Johnson is forced from office, thus denying Boris a wonderful opportunity to campaign against a pro-IRA Trotskyite PM put in office by Remainers.
His choice would be a Government of All the (Remainer) Talents, led by the Speaker, John Bercow, whom the sainted Rod Liddle aptly described in last week’s Sunday Times as ‘Everything you loathe about our current parliament — its narcissism, its contempt for the voter, its bumptiousness, its idiocy — all wrapped up in one tiny little bundle. For comedy value, that has its attractions.’
Speaker Bercow was a Tory MP who moved a long way to the Left after he married and had been expected to cross the floor before Labour MPs made him Speaker. They did so to annoy the Tories, a plan which has succeeded better than in their wildest dreams.
A letter to the Sunday Times says: ‘A puppet government, led by a noisy garden gnome, will unite nobody’, but a Government of National Unity led by Bercow might unite the country because few can stand him.
But then a Government of National Unity is a deceitful name for an administration formed to impose the view of 48 per cent of the people over 52 per cent, so unity is beside the point.
By the way, were John Bercow to become Prime Minister, he would be the third Speaker to do so, the others being Henry Addington, who replaced Pitt the Younger from 1801 to 1804 and signed the Treaty of Amiens with Napoleon, and William Greville who, following Pitt’s death in office in 1806, headed the previous ‘Ministry of All the Talents’.
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was offered the Speakership and considered accepting it while Liberal leader but this would have meant ceasing to be leader of his party. Instead he became Prime Minister when the Tory Prime Minister A J Balfour resigned unexpectedly in 1905, the last time a political party has come to power in Britain without a general election.
Why would Boris be forced from office? Ostensibly to prevent him somehow taking the UK out of the EU on Hallowe’en, in reality to make sure a referendum is held before an election because this is the best chance Remainers have of preventing Brexit altogether.
Until very recently they simply wanted to prevent the country leaving the EU without a deal. Now thanks to the long campaign by Tony Blair, Sir Keir Starmer and others, they see a good chance of stopping Brexit altogether.
A second referendum, similarly, is always called a ‘People’s Vote’, as if dogs and cats voted in the last one, the result of which has not been implemented. Like ‘Government of National Unity’, it’s the technique of the Big Lie.
